Tag Archives: package

A brief summary:
I’m working with Spacewalk for three years now, from version 2.4 on. We manage about 350 systems, 30 channels, 50 repositories and 105.000 packages. We import new packages and errata on a daily basis, roll out critical patches to stage systems automatically and do weekly/monthly patchdays on productive systems only via Spacewalk.

Lately the periodic syncs of our CentOS 6 x86_64 channel failed on every run. New packages stayed in the queue and could not be rolled out to our systems. The Taskomatic daemon sends out error notification emails to the set administrator mailbox in which it basically tells you that the repo-sync-bunch failed and in which logfile you can read more about this issue.

There we have the package_ids that have to be in any way responsible for the failed sync. Let’s do a quick search via the GUI to find out more about them. After looking them up one by one I found out that all three of them where still in the package queue and not associated with a channel yet. You can see that in the software package manager.

Orphaned packages

So what now? I know that these packages remain in the queue because the import fails but the real cause of the error seems to be something that’s already in the database which has some attribute with exact the same value as one of these three packages. Let’s google that error message and see if someone had the same issue in the past.
Seems like this happend once in 2016 because of a duplicate package published with Red Hat. Let’s see if one of these packages already exists in the database. Bingo! The sysstat and python-setuptools package have already been published some month prior but with a faulty name schema. Like in 2016 the package names didn’t contain a dot between the package version and the OS release version. In theory simply deleting the faulty package should solve the problem but let’s see…

Delete the duplicate package

Okay and now let’s try to rerun the channel synchronisation and see if it runs without errors.13:51:02 Sync of channel completed in 0:04:30.
13:51:02 Total time: 0:04:30